Martin Charnin on "West Side Story"

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• Leonard Bernstein
• Annie (Musical)
• West Side Story (Musical)
• Steve Allen
• Louis Pasteur

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It sounds like an episode from Steve Allen’s old Meeting of Minds series, where actors playing Aristotle, Emily Dickinson, Genghis Khan, and Louis Pasteur would sit around and discuss Big Issues in character. At tonight’s event, part of the “Seattle Celebrates Bernstein” festival, four actors will recreate a 1987 roundtable discussion among Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Lawrence, and Jerome Robbins, the men who’d made West Side Story 30 years earlier. (The film version’s screening for SIFF at the Harvard Exit, 1:15 p.m. Sun., June 6, btw.) One of the actors is Martin Charnin, a Jet in the original WSS Broadway cast, who’ll share further memories of the larger-than-life composer and the gig that launched his theatrical career—he became the lyricist for Annie and now directs the local company Showtunes (whose concert staging of Sondheim’s Follies plays June 5-6 at the Moore.) Bernstein songs round out this warm bath of stage nostalgia. GAVIN BORCHERT
Mon., June 7, 7:30 p.m., 2010